2023 Crosstrek Auto shutoff

Yep, turns off the engine while you are sitting at a stop light. You normally are resting your foot on the brake pedal while fully stopped, like when waiting at a stop light. As soon as you release the brake pedal, and before even pressing the accelerometer pedal, the engine restarts. If there is a load on the engine while you are stopped, like you have the A/C running, the engine keeps running.

The car's manual doesn't describe the feature? Have a read. Have several reads. The feature has the extremely technical title of "Auto Start Stop system". The manual describe all the various conditions under which the feature will function, and several when it won't.

And, yes, there is an override switch which is also described in the manual. There are a lot of pages in the manual. Alas, instead of giving you a manual for only the car you purchased, it covers every option that the car might have instead of what features you actually have, plus it may cover more than one model in the manual. Sit in the car while reading the manual to quickly determine if a describe feature is available in your car. If not, skip that section.

[Snipped since I wasn't going to bother fixing the missing attribution.]

Per the manual for the OP's vehicle, it has an override switch to permanently disable/enable. The OP gets a choice. It's in the manual.

I think the only permanent fix is having the dealer disable it, which they may resist doing. Otherwise, you'll need to toggle it off each drive.

This is a response to the post seen at:

Thanks 2 all that commented. Great info.

I read the other day that the savings in gas is like 2.8 gal / yr and there is a seperate battery being used to restart the eng and its like a $300 added repair expense when it fails.

UFO snipped-for-privacy@nospam.gmx.com> wrote:

As for fuel savings, Subaru claims auto-start-stop saves 3% to %10. How much you save depends on the grade (octane) of gas you buy.

the "How much can you save?" section.

All this auto-start-stop has most effect for urban dwellers having to stop at almost every intersection in the city. For rural dwellers, their stops are far apart as they mostly drive on lanes and highways. If you're out in the boonies, auto-start-stop won't save you anything. If you commute in the city, especially downtown, yeah, you get to save.

As the Edmund article points out, savings depends on how much of an electrical load you put on the batteries while stopped. If the A/C is running, you're pushing the stereo to max volume with max bass (you know, those buzzing, rattling cars you hear at the stops), headlights on, wipers wiping, and so on, then you have a higher electrical load, including when stopped. The higher the load, the shorter the off-cycle.

If you keep restarting while stopping, like creeping up behind another car that crept forward, you keep cycling through start-stop cycles, and that reduces gas efficiency. You don't let the car stay stopped for very long, so you effectively wipe out the savings. Even tugging on the steering wheel while stopped will restart the car.

While the savings may not be much to you, especially if you're not a city dweller, car makers have to look at gas savings over ALL the cars they sell. Maybe you save 5 gallons per 20K miles, but then multiply that by the over 600K+ cars Subaru sold per year, and add in the sales volume for all other auto makers. They're trying to put less pollutants into the air.

"In the United States, according to the Department of Energy, idling wastes more than 6 billion U.S. gallons of fuel per year."

But the biggest reason auto makers add auto-stop is regulation (i.e., gov't overreach). Law forbids car makers to exceed certain CO2 output on average across their entire fleet. The EPA offers gas mileage rating incentives to car makers who configure auto-stop to On when the car starts. EPA deliberately tests in a manner that will lower the average MPG for a vehicle whose auto-stop feature does not reset (to On) when the car is started.

The gov't knows what is best for you whether you like it or not. Car makers have to bend to regulatory compliance. Doesn't matter that the hardened starter and AGM battery will last 3 times longer, because they cost twice as much. Those gas savings get eaten by higher maintenance costs. Because of all the stopping which lets the oil drain from the engine, and despite accumulators, you have to change your engine oil more often. Not as bad when cold starting your engine where the oil has drained since the engine and oil are at operating temperature during auto-stops. Electric water pumps are used to keep the engine cooled during auto-stops, but now you have an electric pump to replace instead of a much cheaper fan belt. Luckily the transmission goes into neutral during auto-stop. The gov't wants to lower emissions. They don't care about increasing your cost of ownership. There is also the issue that when stopped, sometimes the auto-stop system doesn't start the car when it is supposed to, or not start at all. What if all wheels are locked with heavy braking which activates the auto-stop, that could be when sliding on ice or skidding around a turn when you really don't want to lose power when needed immediately. Some cars with auto-stop have electric compressors for A/C, but some don't, so you get to cook in hot summer in stop-and-go city traffic.

You can disable auto-start-stop, but likely it resets when you turn off the car, so the next time you use the car it is enabled again. You'd have to get in the habit of starting your car, and hitting the disable switch each time. If the engage button is on the steering wheel, it is a very minimal effort to tap it after starting the car. If you forget, you'll remember at your first auto-stop.

Some other tricks I've heard are: a little less pressure on the brake pedal when stopping, or really hard pressure after stopped, so the stop-start indicator turns orange (off); setting the defroster to always be on to increase the electrical load while stopped; an autostop eliminator to reset on start what it was previously configured

, but you're paying a $100 to eliminate a nuisance that would be easy to ignore; putting the car into Sport mode; making a rolling stop at a stop sign like everyone else does; get an OBD2 dongle, plug it in, and see if you can reprogram the ECU settings; don't use Drive, and instead select a driving gear (turn your automatic into a manual); and probably some other trick to up electrical load or keep auto-stop from triggering.

More great info, very good.

Yes, turning the steering wheel will restart the eng, tested that today.

I observed that as you slow down to the red light, the engine seems to react like its a manual transmision in that you have the clutch engaged at the same time as the brake and it feels like its in danger of stalling.

It actually does stall when u come to a full stop with this feature...and it seems you only have to be sttopped a very short time for it to activate. I notiuced it seems prone if its a light near a major overpass capable of lots of traffic, even tho theres very little traffic going on.

Is it perhaps getting telemetry from the cameras and other stuff that takes pictures trying to catch speeders or light runners at the intersections?

A lot of engine- or vacuum-powered motors got replaced with electric motors in auto-stop cars. From what others have said, auto-stop cars have "power" steering by using electric motors, so turning it ups the load on the electrical system which is higher than the auto-stop battery can tolerate, or the auto-stop logic decides you are beginning to drive again, so it auto-starts. A LOT of components in auto-stop cars got replaced with electric motors.

As I understand it (which is still little), the Eyesight system might get involved with auto-stop, but its consequential, like you come up to a stoplight with pedestrians around, so maybe the Eyesight pedestrian monitoring gets triggered. I don't think the Eyesight can read traffic lights as to what color they show; else, it could override you trying to run a red light.

Automatic stop-and-go (bumper-to-bumper) speed control using EyeSight is currently (or was) only a feature of EyeSight X in Japan where the car can Auto drive. I don't know if Eyesight X has filtered yet into the US market, but then I don't know where you are. Eyesight 4.0 add speed sign reading and ACC (adaptive cruise control) speed limiting which is part of Eyesight X.

You didn't say if you were first in line stopped at a traffic light, or behind someone else also waiting there. Eyesight has its adaptive cruise control on select models where you can choose the distance to maintain you and the car ahead.

Seems like this is a pain to many drivers: